Australia will force U.S. tech giants Facebook and Google to pay Australian media outlets for news content in a landmark move to protect independent journalism that will be watched around the world. From a report: Australia will become the first country to require Facebook and Google to pay for news content provided by media companies under a royalty-style system that will become law this year, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said. "It's about a fair go for Australian news media businesses. It's about ensuring that we have increased competition, increased consumer protection, and a sustainable media landscape," Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne. "Nothing less than the future of the Australian media landscape is at stake." The move comes as the tech giants fend off calls around the world for greater regulation, and a day after Google and Facebook took a battering for alleged abuse of market power from U.S. lawmakers in a congressional hearing.

sciencehabit writes: Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The microbes are oxygen-loving species that somehow exist on what little of the gas diffuses from the ocean surface deep into the seabed. The discovery raises the "insane" possibility, as one of the scientists put it, that the microbes have been sitting in the sediment dormant, or at least slowly growing without dividing, for eons. The new work demonstrates "microbial life is very persistent, and often finds a way to survive," says Virginia Edgcomb, a microbial ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the work.

What's more, by showing that life can survive in places biologists once thought uninhabitable, the research speaks to the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System, or elsewhere in the universe. "If the surface of a particular planet does not look promising for life, it may be holding out in the subsurface," says Andreas Teske, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was also not involved with the new study. Researchers have known that life exists "under the floorboards" of the ocean for more than 15 years. But geomicrobiologist Yuki Morono of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology wanted to know the limits of such life. Microbes are known to live in very hot or toxic environments, but can they live where there's little food to eat? To find out, Morono and his colleagues mounted a drilling expedition in the South Pacific Gyre, a site of intersecting ocean currents east of Australia that is considered the deadest part of the world's oceans, almost completely lacking the nutrients needed for survival. When they extracted cores of clay and other sediments from as deep as 5700 meters below sea level, they confirmed the samples did indeed contain some oxygen, a sign that there was very little organic material for bacteria to eat.

The world's hardware haven is taking a digital leap for pets. From a report: In May, China's southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K., Japan, Australia and a growing number of countries to make microchips mandatory for dogs. This week, city regulators began to set up injection stations across their partnering pet clinics, according to social media posts from the Shenzhen Urban Management Bureau. The chip, which is said to last for at least 15 years and comes in the size of a grain of rice, is implanted under the skin of a dog's neck. Each chip, when scanned by authorized personnel, reveals a unique 15-digit number matching the dog's name and breed, as well as its owner's identity and contact information -- which will help reduce strays.

Australia's competition regulator on Monday accused Alphabet's Google of misleading consumers to get permission for use of their personal data for targeted advertising, seeking a fine "in the millions" and aiming to establish a precedent. From a report: The move comes as scrutiny grows worldwide over data privacy, with U.S. and European lawmakers recently focusing on how tech companies treat user data. In court documents, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) accused Google of not explicitly getting consent or properly informing consumers of a 2016 move to combine personal information in Google accounts with browsing activities on non-Google websites. "This change ... was worth a lot of money to Google," said commission chairman Rod Sims. "We allege they've achieved it through misleading behaviour." The change allowed Google to link the browsing behaviour of millions of consumers with their names and identities, providing it with extreme market power, the regulator added. "We consider Google misled Australian consumers about what it planned to do with large amounts of their personal information, including internet activity on websites not connected to Google," Sims said.

A digital nomad describes what no one ever warns you about after selling everything and then travelling to Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand "before doing the Working Holiday Visa thing in Australia and New Zealand." It was the greatest solo travel adventure of my life and I loved it. That said, I've had some time to reflect on my experience and there are some things I wish I'd known before diving in headfirst... [I]n reality, you're working just as hard, only from a different place. You still have deadlines...and you still have to hound clients who take forever to pay you after your project is done.

Did I mention that this is all done in a completely different time zone from the people you're working with? This can also be tricky when it comes to conference calls but nothing you can't figure out and plan for.

While you may have given yourself a more beautiful backdrop to work with, you're still going to spend a decent amount of time behind your laptop wherever you go, though on the bright side, you will also have the opportunity to work alongside the locals, hear different accents, taste new and amazing food and check out your new surroundings whenever you're off, so it's all good...
I once spent six months living "on the road" as a digital nomad, which felt like a nice long extended trip (rather than settling for an exotic one-week vacation). But it'd be interesting to hear anecdotes from Slashdot's readers — so share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

And is work easier for digital nomads?

Australian and British privacy regulators opened a joint probe into Clearview AI, saying they want to examine how the company's facial-recognition technology uses people's data, just days after the company suspended operations in Canada. From a report: The Australian Information Commissioner and the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office said they will focus on the company's use of "scraped" data and biometrics of individuals. Clearview is facing growing scrutiny of the billions of images it has scraped from social media platforms and how the New York-based company shares those with law enforcement agencies. It suspended a contract with its last Canadian client, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, after regulators there said they were investigating allegations Clearview collected personal information without consent and shared it with police. Clearview will cooperate with the U.K. and Australian regulators, Chief Executive Officer Hoan Ton-That said in a statement. The company searches publicly available photos from the Internet in accordance with applicable laws, he said.

"Six months into a pandemic that has killed over half a million people, more than 200 scientists from around the world are challenging the official view of how the coronavirus spreads," reports the Los Angeles Times: The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that you have to worry about only two types of transmission: inhaling respiratory droplets from an infected person in your immediate vicinity or — less common — touching a contaminated surface and then your eyes, nose or mouth.

But other experts contend that the guidance ignores growing evidence that a third pathway also plays a significant role in contagion.

They say multiple studies demonstrate that particles known as aerosols — microscopic versions of standard respiratory droplets — can hang in the air for long periods and float dozens of feet, making poorly ventilated rooms, buses and other confined spaces dangerous, even when people stay six feet from one another. "We are 100% sure about this," said Lidia Morawska, a professor of atmospheric sciences and environmental engineering at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. She makes the case in an open letter to the WHO accusing the United Nations agency of failing to issue appropriate warnings about the risk. A total of 239 researchers from 32 countries signed the letter, which is set to be published next week in a scientific journal.

In interviews, experts said that aerosol transmission appears to be the only way to explain several "super-spreading" events, including the infection of diners at a restaurant in China who sat at separate tables and of choir members in Washington state who took precautions during a rehearsal... The proponents of aerosol transmission said masks worn correctly would help prevent the escape of exhaled aerosols as well as inhalation of the microscopic particles. But they said the spread could also be reduced by improving ventilation and zapping indoor air with ultraviolet light in ceiling units.
The Times also got a response from Dr. Benedetta Allegranzi, a top WHO expert on infection prevention and control, who argued the group only presented theories based on experiments rather than actual evidence from the field.

Allegranzi also added that in weekly teleconferences, a large majority of a group of more than 30 international experts advising the WHO had "not judged the existing evidence sufficiently convincing to consider airborne transmission as having an important role in COVID-19 spread."

"A new study found low to moderate drinking may improve cognitive function for White middle-aged or older adults," reports CNN: The findings support prior research which found that, generally, one standard drink a day for women and two a day for men -- which is the US guidance -- appears to offer some cognitive benefits... "There is now a lot of observational evidence showing that light to moderate alcohol drinking is associated with better cognitive function and a lower risk of dementia compared with alcohol abstaining," said senior principal research scientist Kaarin Anstey, a director of the NHMRC Dementia Centre for Research Collaboration in Australia, who was not involved in the study...

The new study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, analyzed data on nearly 20,000 participants from the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal panel study that surveys a representative sample of Americans on a variety of health issues. Study participants, who were predominately white, female and a mean age of 62, were given cognitive tests starting in 1996 through 2008, and were surveyed every other year for approximately nine years. When compared with those who said they never drank, low to moderate drinking was associated with significantly higher cognition scores for mental status, word recall and vocabulary over time, as well as with lower rates of decline in each of those areas.
But before you get too excited, CNN has a "However..." paragraph: However, a major global study released last year found that no amount of liquor, wine or beer is safe for your overall health. It found that alcohol was the leading risk factor for disease and premature death in men and women between the ages of 15 and 49 worldwide in 2016, accounting for nearly one in 10 deaths... "What we know for sure is that drinking too much alcohol definitely harms the brain in a major way. What is less clear is whether or not low to moderate intake may be protective in certain people, or if total abstinence is the most sound advice," said neurologist Dr. Richard Isaacson, founder of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medical Center. "Based on conflicting studies, I don't think at this time we can know for sure whether none versus low to moderate consumption is best in each individual person..."

China's WeChat, like most social networks, is a haven for disinformation and "fake news". Less well-known, at least in the West, is its role in mobilising Chinese diaspora communities to support particular political policies or people, according to a report. schwit1 shares the report: These activities are coordinated through a system known as the United Front, a network of party and state agencies that are responsible for influencing purportedly independent groups outside the Chinese Communist Party. At the very top, the United Front Work Department is led by China's fourth most senior political leader, Wang Yang. President Xi Jinping and his family have been involved in United Front work for decades. "Where United Front really works their biggest magic is actually on social media WeChat," says Maree Ma, general manager of Vision Times, a leading Chinese-language Australian media outlet. WeChat's private groups are capped at 500 members, but according to Ma, there's "hundreds" of United Front organisations in Australia, each of them with many of these groups.

The City of Sydney is now powered by 100% renewable electricity, generated from wind and solar farms in regional New South Wales. From a report: The "green energy" deal which came into effect on Wednesday is valued at over $60 million and is touted by the City of Sydney Council as the biggest green energy deal of its kind by a council in Australia. Under the deal, all the city of Sydney operations -- including street lights, pools, sports fields, depots, buildings and the historic Sydney Town Hall -- will now be run on 100% renewable electricity from locally-sourced clean energy. The Council says the switch is projected to save the City up to half a million dollars a year over the next 10 years, and reduce C02 emissions by around 20,000 tonnes a year -- the equivalent to the power consumption of more than 6,000 households.

Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the new agreement will generate jobs, support communities impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and create new opportunities in drought-affected regional NSW. "We are in the middle of a climate emergency. If we are to reduce emissions and grow the green power sector, all levels of government must urgently transition to renewable energy," the Lord Mayor said. "Cities are responsible for 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, so it is critical that we take effective and evidence-based climate actions. The City of Sydney became carbon neutral in 2007, and were the first government in Australia to be certified carbon neutral in 2011. This new deal will see us reach our 2030 target of reducing emissions by 70 per cent by 2024, six years early. This ground-breaking $60 million renewable electricity deal will also save our ratepayers money and support regional jobs in wind and solar farms in Glen Innes, Wagga Wagga and the Shoalhaven."

Microsoft has announced it will permanently close all of its physical retail stores and transfer most of its resources to online channels. From a report: This comes after the computing giant shuttered the outlets in late March due to the COVID-19 crisis. In what Microsoft is touting as a "new approach to retail," the company said its retail store employees will be transitioned to its corporate hubs and will provide customers remote sales, training, and support. The company will focus its efforts on existing digital stores on Microsoft.com and through Windows and Xbox, which have a collective reach of 1.2 billion people globally. Microsoft added that the closures will result in a pre-tax charge of around $450 million, which it said consists mostly of asset write-offs and impairments. The Seattle-based tech titan debuted its first physical retail experience back in 1999 at the Sony-owned Metreon shopping complex in San Francisco, though that closed around a decade later. Microsoft's first real foray into brick-and-mortar retail was in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2009. This grew to around a hundred similar outlets across the U.S., including its New York flagship, which opened in 2015. The company later went international, opening seven retail stores in Canada, one in Australia, and one in the U.K.

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange's alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States. DOJ, in a press release: The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019. It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged. According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks. Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to tout his own history as a "famous teenage hacker in Australia" and to encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks. In 2009, for instance, Assange told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks had obtained nonpublic documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting "a small vulnerability" inside the document distribution system of the United States Congress, and then asserted that "[t]his is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking." In 2010, Assange gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATO country. In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an "Anonymous" and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again.

A sophisticated, state-sponsored cyber attack is targeting Australian government, business, education and political organisations [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the prime minister has warned. From a report: Scott Morrison did not reveal the identity of the state actor that was responsible for the attacks, which he said had been launched over many months. But the scale and sophistication of the malicious activity prompted cyber-security experts to speculate that China was the most likely culprit. "Based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organisations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor," Mr Morrison said on Friday. "This act is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure."

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Construction is beginning on the world's largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid. The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. The Highview battery will store 250MWh of energy, almost double the amount stored by the biggest chemical battery, built by Tesla in South Australia. The new project is sited at the Trafford Energy Park, also home to the Carrington gas-powered energy plant and a closed coal power station. The plant's lifetime is expected to be 30-40 years.

Facebook has rejected a proposal to share advertising revenue with news organisations, saying there would "not be significant" impacts on its business if it stopped sharing news altogether. From a report: On Monday, the social media giant issued its response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has been tasked with creating a mandatory code of conduct aimed at levelling the playing field. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, told the ACCC to develop a code after multiple Australian media companies and regional newspapers cut jobs, or folded entirely, as a result of advertising downturn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Facebook and Google have previously refused to accept they needed to pay for using news content. In its submission to the watchdog, Facebook said it rejected many of the ACCC's potential ideas, and said there was a "healthy rivalry" between itself and news organisations. The social media giant said it supported the idea of a code of conduct between digital platforms and news publishers, but that itself and Google were being "singled out" unfairly. Facebook also said it could cut out news completely without any significant impact on its business.

Space Force, the branch of the US armed services established by the Trump administration last December, now shares a name with a Netflix comedy starring Steve Carrell. From a report: The military reportedly isn't too concerned about possible confusion over the fictional show's name. Netflix, however, has reportedly secured trademark rights in Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere for Space Force. Currently, the Air Force only owns a pending application for registration of the name Space Force in the US based on intent to use, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Records obtained by the publication showed that Netflix was submitting applications for the name "Space Force" internationally back in January 2019.

Leading media outlets in Australia lost big in court when a judge ruled publishers can be sued for comments left on their Facebook pages.

They're now considering an appeal, reports the Financial Express: The court upheld an earlier ruling in the Supreme Court that the outlets were "first or primary distributors" of the comments about Dylan Voller, a former detainee at Northern Territory's Don Dale Youth Detention Centrethat were attached to news stories in December 2016 and January 2017... It said the outlets "encouraged and facilitated the making of comments by third parties which when posted on the page were made available to Facebook users generally and were therefore publishers of the comments".

The court also held that the outlets could not rely on a defence of innocent dissemination...

Justice John Basten said: "Perhaps with a degree of hyperbole, they submitted that they were more closely equivalent to the supplier of paper to a newspaper owner or the supplier of a computer to an author." He dismissed the suggestion the outlets played "no active" role in regard to the postings on their Facebook pages. "The point of distinction may be accepted; however, it does not follow that they were not publishers,'' Justice Basten said. "They facilitated the posting of comments on articles published in their newspapers and had sufficient control over the platform to be able to delete postings when they became aware that they were defamatory."

In a separate judgment, Justice Tony Meagher and Acting Justice Carolyn Simpson said that by inviting the public to comment, the outlets "accepted responsibility for the use of their Facebook facilities".

The hits came this week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Thursday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe. It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world's poor. From a report: Climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and more intense. Now, because of the pandemic, they come at a time when national economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits. Relief organizations working in eastern India and Bangladesh, for instance, say the lockdown had already forced people to rely on food aid by the time the storm, Cyclone Amphan, hit. Then, the high winds and heavy rains ruined newly sown crops that were meant to feed communities through next season. "People have nothing to fall back on," Pankaj Anand, a director at Oxfam India, said in a statement Thursday. The worst may be yet to come.

Several other climate hazards are looming, as the coronavirus unspools its long tail around the world. They include the prospect of heat waves in Europe and South Asia, wildfires from the western United States to Europe to Australia, and water scarcity in South America and Southern Africa, where a persistent drought is already deepening hunger. And then there's the locusts. Locusts. Abnormally heavy rains last year, which scientists say were made more likely by the long-term warming of the Indian Ocean, a hallmark of climate change, have exacerbated a locust infestation across eastern Africa. Higher temperatures make it more inviting for locusts to spread to places where the climate wasn't as suitable before -- and in turn, destroy vast swaths of farmland and pasture for some of the poorest people on the planet.

Researchers based out of Australia's Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities say they've set a new internet speed record of 44.2 Tbps, according to a paper published in the open-access journal Nature Communications. That's theoretically enough speed to download the contents of more than 50 100GB Ultra HD Blu-ray discs in a single second. The Verge reports: What's interesting about the research is that it was achieved over 75km of standard optical fiber using a single integrated chip source, meaning it has the potential to one day benefit existing fiber infrastructure. The test fiber connection ran between RMIT's Melbourne City campus and Monash University's Clayton campus, and the researchers say it mirrors infrastructure used by Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The findings represent a "world-record for bandwidth," according to Swinburne University Professor David Moss, one of the team members responsible.

Those speeds were achieved, thanks to a piece of technology called a micro-comb, which offers a more efficient and compact way to transmit data. This micro-comb was placed within the cable's fibers in what the researchers say is the first time the technology has been used in a field trial. Now, the researchers say the challenge is to turn the technology into something that can be used with existing infrastructure. "Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fiber links with minimal cost," RMIT's Professor Arnan Mitchell says.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once called Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, a "lone warrior." Putin was joking, but that description is starting to look more and more accurate. Russia has joined about 100 countries in backing a resolution at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA), calling for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The European Union-drafted resolution comes on the back of a push by Australia for an inquiry into China's initial handling of the crisis. That was met with an angry response from Beijing, which accused Canberra of a "highly irresponsible" move that could "disrupt international cooperation in fighting the pandemic and goes against people's shared aspiration." While the resolution to be presented at the annual meeting of World Health Organization (WHO) members, which begins on Monday in Geneva, does not single out China or any other country, it calls for an "impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation" of "the (WHO)-coordinated international health response to Covid-19."

The wording of the resolution is weak compared to Australia's previous calls for a probe into China's role and responsibility in the origin of the pandemic. This may have been necessary to get a majority of WHO member states to sign on -- particularly those, such as Russia, with traditionally strong ties to Beijing. But that doesn't mean China's government should rest easy. The potential for an independent probe, even one not initially tasked with investigating an individual country's response, to turn up damning or embarrassing information is great. Australian government sources told the ABC, the country's public broadcaster, that the resolution's language was sufficiently strong to "ensure that a proper and thorough investigation took place."